It's all fun and games to indulge in letting a growing mind's imagination run wild and build secret hideout places – such as tree houses and campsites until they fire back to prove to be nearly fatal for the child.
Defying all odds, a 13-year-old has defeated death in a miraculous surgery that saved him from a six-inch screw that had pierced his skull, just a millimetre away from killing him.
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The teenager, Darius Foreman, was happily building a treehouse on Saturday, at his home in Maryland, when he fell from a branch, side by side knocking over a wooden board of at least five foot in size, which landed directly atop his head.
This caused a six-inch screw to get lodged in his skull – stopping just a millimetre away from draining the fluid from his brain, which would have caused him to bleed to death.
It took a group of firemen to cut down the wooden board to a size of just a mere two feet, so he could fit into the helicopter that rescued him and airlifted Darius to John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
Dr. Alan Cohen performed an emergency surgery on him, where the nail was carefully removed and he was finally released after the miracle – that too, on his 13th birthday.
Dr. Cohen told CNN that Darius was on 'pins and needles' all through the operation as even the slightest misstep could have been 'catastrophic' for the teenager.
"I absolutely panicked," Darius' mother Joy Ellingsworth shared with CNN. "It was very scary, one of the scariest things I've ever been through." Fire rescue used the family's saw to cut the board down to two feet.
The two-hour-long surgery involved tiny fragments of bone and a small blood clot being removed from Darius' skull. The X-ray provided by the team also showed a portion of the screw lodged between the two hemispheres of his brain.
"He was a millimetre away from having himself bleed to death," said Dr Cohen about the situation the lodged in screw had left the boy in. "He's a lucky kid," he added about the miraculous battle the boy endured between life and fate.
